Top 5 Conference Takeaways

August 17, 2017

This year I had the opportunity to attend the HOW Design Live Conference. It’s an event that brings together great designers from around the world to share their greatest thoughts, ideas and experiences regarding design. It’s a great place to reinvigorate the design senses and discover new trends and ideas. Of all the things that I learned and experienced, these are my top 5.

Dream the way you did when you were a kid

Creativity isn’t something that you can turn on and off, but it is something that you need daily to be a graphic designer. That isn’t always the easiest thing to accomplish. Dream the way you did when you were a kid is the best way to fix this. Kids don’t always understand the rules; as a result, they are always thinking outside of the box.

Hello, I’d like to add you to my professional network on Linkedin

Frank Chimero is a speaker who thinks like he did when he was a kid. He was reading The New Yorker comics one day and saw a contest asking people to think about a simple line for their next comic. He took it a step further and decided to come up with a line that would work for every comic ever printed in The New Yorker. What he came up with went viral. “Hello, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” It started out with a simple post on twitter and ended up being printed in an issue of magazine. Hello, I’d like…

Not all fonts are created equal

Fonts have been around for a long time but only recently have people outside of the design world really started to pay attention to them. Computers have made access to thousands of fonts easy and cheap. The problem is that many of those fonts are designed for printing and not screens. Font foundries have taken up the task to redesign many existing fonts to better appear on screen. They have also expanded the different weights of fonts to include various versions of fonts like light, regular, book, medium, semi-bold, bold, black, etc. If you use a cool new font, make sure you know how it’s being used so it always looks its best.

Learn to speak in business terms, understand your clients’ pains and show how you can fix them

Designers are visual people. We can spend hours talking about a design and why we chose to design it the way we did with certain colors and elements. Understandable—clients don’t always share our enthusiasm for all that detail. They hire us to fix a problem for them. We need to speak about a design with the purpose of showing them how a whole design piece will help them fix their issue and increase their sales or presence in their market.

Spew Bag Challenge, Make Plane Rides Fun Again!

Inspiration comes at the most random times. Speaker Gemma O’Brien spends a lot of time in airplanes and needed an outlet for her creativity. She found it in the pocket on the seat in front of her. She decided to draw funny illustrations on the air sickness bags (or spew bag) and leave them for the next person to find. Spew Bag Challenge!